A large number of people are buying high density televisions (HDTVs) and are watching high density (HD) videos on their HDTVs. A person can have a good viewing experience of HO video when the HD video data is transmitted over a well provisioned network with a wide bandwidth that can easily accommodate the high bit rate associated with HD video data. However, there is an increasing demand to transmit HD videos over constrained networks, for example, that are typically associated with a home, a small office, or a satellite office. The delay in transmitting HD videos over constrained networks can reach an order of a second. In the past, one solution has been to pre-fetch previously recorded HD videos. However, users are starting to request HD videos in real time over constrained networks. Since the HD videos are requested in real time, pre-fetching the HD videos is not an option. Further, delays of the order of a second are unacceptable when two end points are interactively communicating HD video with each other (also referred to herein as “conferencing”).
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